HIS vs EVGA Midrange Gaming Face Off Review

Conclusion

With so much available data it’s quite a challenge to round it all up in a pithy fashion.

Let’s start with pure first places in our tests, ignoring Medal of Honor which was near identical for all cards.

The HD6870 came first in 12 of our 32 tests, 20 if you include Resident Evil 5 which it won all 8. The GTX460 1GB won 9 of our 32 tests, and the GTX460 768MB won 3.

Now if we take Resident Evil 5 to be a game that, akin to how GRiD used to be, is an absolute lover of the ATI cards, then it’s a perfect split down the middle, 12 each.

So it’s very very close. Even if most of the ones that had a win to one card or another there aren’t many that are a comprehensive victory.

The HIS HD6850 didn’t win any of our tests outright but has great “stock performance”. Overclocked it really is a slave to its architectural limitations, not achieving anything more than one or two extra FPS which can just as easily be put down to variances in bench runs. The single card wont set the world alight but it also doesn’t fall down anywhere either. It’s a very solid, good value all-rounder. Crossfire performance is very good and it actually stays very close to the HD6870. Just a shame it doesn’t overclock well.

The HIS HD6870 just continues to bang out the big scores. In such a closely matched contest to win 60% of the tests is quite something. Once we eliminate Resident Evil 5 though it’s 50%. Still impressive. Especially when you consider that most of the tests it did win it won by quite a margin. It also just about benefits from our overclock, although similarly to the HD6850 it really isn’t an overclocking beast, but rather a great out the box card.

Moving on to the EVGA GTX460 768MB and 1GB cards, we were interested in the start of testing to see if the need for large on-board memory was purely for the big numbers, or genuinely important. Many years ago it was important when a 64MB or 128MB card was the norm, but does it hold up? Clearly it does as quite a few of our games found that the combination of 1920×1200 testing resolution plus such high levels of anti-aliasing filled the frame-buffer up and therefore dropped the performance significantly. The 1GB card on the other hand never encountered such an issue. Both cards, but the 768MB one in particular, respond very well to an overclock giving quite an improvement in performance.

 

HIS 6850 vs EVGA GTX 460 768MB Video

 

HIS 6870 vs EVGA GTX460 1GB Video

 

HIS 6870 Crossfire vs EVGA GTX460 1GB SLI Video

But there is a big question still to answer.

What do we recommend?

All of the systems on test today provide very good performance indeed, especially for the budget. You really can’t go wrong with any of them. That’s a bit vague though. We aren’t here to win friends with vague answers, we’re here to give an answer on where our money would go.
So here it is :

Single Card Winner : HIS HD6870

Dual Card Winner : EVGA GTX460 1GB

The HIS HD6870 really is a great card for just a sniff under £200. There is no denying the amount of clear victories it has and with the new 6 series cards having 3D too, you really get the best of all worlds.

The EVGA GTX460 1GB might not always top the timing sheets so to speak, but it has two huge things in its favour as a SLI setup. The first is unquestionably the price. You can get a couple of GTX460 1GB cards for about £320, which is £80 less than the HD6870 would be in Crossfire. So you can have performance above that of any single card, for lots less than the GTX480, whilst also benefiting from PhysX and exceptional [email protected] performance.

Naturally with such a range of games on test if you have one or two particular titles in mind then you might sway one way or another, but for general performance, that’s where our pennies would go.

Thanks to HIS Digital and EVGA for their help with this review. Discuss in our forums.